There are numerous well-known health and fitness benefits associated with bodyweight exercises, that is, exercises in which the individual's own weight provides the resistance for the movement. Common examples are: the pull-up or chin-up, in which the individual pulls the bodyweight from above with palms forward or backward in a pronated or supinated grip; the ‘inverted row’, in which the individual lifts the bodyweight upwards via a rowing motion while positioned horizontally with heels on the floor; and, of course, the push-up. The suite of available bodyweight exercises is augmented by so-called ‘suspension training’ exercises in which straps are employed to bear part or all of the bodyweight. Bodyweight exercises allow a full range of muscle groups to be targeted and are widely considered to be essential constituents of a complete workout regime. Bodyweight exercises also have other health benefits such as improving posture or suppleness in the joints. For example, some medical practitioners have proposed that a variety of shoulder problems are caused by modern lifestyles and in particular a lack of use of core shoulder functionality and that a selective remedy is to regularly suspend one's bodyweight from above in order to stretch the rotator cuff and relieve impingements. Therefore, the usefulness of exercises that require an elevated weight-bearing anchorage from which to suspend all or part of one's weight, either by direct contact or through connecting equipment such as webbing straps, is well established.
There is a prevalent and growing market for personal fitness and its equipment. With a growing network of public gym facilities there has been a concomitant growth in demand for alternative fitness equipment as users seek to avoid gym membership fees.
The majority of prior art examples of portable personal bodyweight exercise apparatus usually involve the attachment permanently or temporarily of a device to a doorway frame or jamb. For example GR20020100341 discloses a bar with two end fittings that are secured to the door's jamb through a nut. U.S. Pat. No. 3,738,550 requires two metallic brackets to be fastened to a door jamb, or U.S. Pat. No. 5,072,934 discloses U-shaped brackets which are screwed into opposing door jambs. Bolting screws into a door frame or side jambs is something that many people are unwilling or unable to do. Apparatus such as U.S. Pat. No. 3,915,452 that rest on the head jamb are similarly not suited to many doorframes due to the lack of weight-bearing ability in the head jamb. Thus, most such devices that are known in the art lack consideration of the structural or cosmetic integrity of the door frames. Devices involving attachment to a doorway frame or jamb can lack versatility and may not have a broad range of potential uses. For example, such devices are not available for use by tenants of rented properties without a high risk of incurring cost as a result of damage to the doorframe. Similarly, such devices cannot be used in guest accommodation such as in hotels or when staying with friends or family.
Aside from structural and cosmetic considerations, doorway devices also have the limitation that exercises must be performed within a doorway, and this may restrict the range of exercises available. For example, the straps disclosed in GB2475546 could usefully be employed for suspension push-ups only if the vicinity of the door frame is unimpeded by other walls or furniture and the door frame itself is wide enough to encompass the elbow-to-elbow span of the user. A significant percentage of door frames encountered in modern dwellings do not meet such criteria. The requirement for a doorframe to be present at all precludes the use of doorway devices from many and diverse situations in which doorframes are not present, for example when camping, caravanning, or generally outdoors. Various other exercise apparatus with the above shortcomings is available in the prior art for positioning and orientation for use positioned in doorways, such as is exemplified in the following: U.S. Pat. No. 5,468,205 (pulley support units mounted on a door by straps which vertically encircle the door); U.S. Pat. No. 5,221,240 (a door gym apparatus with upper and lower mounts of telescoping configuration having swivel, caps), U.S. Pat. No. 3,226,115 (door-mounted ‘compact gymnasium’, including bench); U.S. Pat. No. 3,979,114 (a device comprising two flexible lines, each line having a stirrup member at one end).
Other than apparatus for use positioned in doorways, other examples of apparatus are known in the art, such as the apparatus disclosed in US20130053220 (mobile fitness system capable of being mounted to a vehicle rack) and US2013237394 (triangular support frames and an attached bar giving pyramidal prismatic structure for user to lean down on). The former relies heavily on extraneous equipment and each makes available only a subset of common bodyweight exercises. Noteworthy commercially available apparatus that provide for bodyweight exercises by way of elevated anchorages by which to suspend the body are as follows: Products relying on inverted T-shaped bars for a frame, which can have a propensity for lateral instabilities. Further, due to the fact that the four support points of such frames define a plane, the use of the device is restricted to operation on near-perfectly flat floors, which significantly restricts the range of available environments (precluding, for example, most outdoor environments with naturally occurring floor surfaces such as grass). Similar issues of stability, versatility, and limited variety of available exercises apply also to U.S. Pat. No. 3,384,332 (gymnastics gallows for ring exercises). Other prior devices either lack versatility or are not portable and so are limited in their range of use. Other known frame shapes include children's play swings.
As these examples and the foregoing discussion illustrates, there is a need for portable and versatile bodyweight exercise apparatus for use in a broad range of environments and conditions.